The World Wildlife Fund using Drupal for Climate Change Adaptation Platform

In 2009 the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) chose Appnovation Technologies to develop a Drupal based community website named Adaptation Learning Platforms. The portal is a community platform which allows NGOs, researchers, and policy makers collaborate together and look at how wildlife is affected by global climate challenges. It features community tools such as groups, discussion forums and user profiles. Initally WWF looked at using Open Atrium, but they quickly realized that since the site is not a project based site, the Open Atrium version would not be as effective. WWF made the decision to develop their ALPs site on the Drupal platform because it offers all the community options they wanted to incorporate and is easily scalable.

For more than 45 years, WWF has been protecting the future of nature. The world’s leading conservation organization, WWF works in 100 countries and is supported by 1.2 million members in the United States and close to 5 million globally. WWF's unique way of working combines global reach with a foundation in science, involves action at every level from local to global, and ensures the delivery of innovative solutions that meet the needs of both people and nature.

Site Design and Functionalities

The design of the Adaptation Learning Platforms was the focusing of the many ideas the client had during the design process. As it is associated with the World Wildlife Fund, there were certain guidelines that had to be followed, but some leeway was afforded as it was a specifically purposed project site. Color palette and typography were provided by the client. Wireframes were created in OmniGraffle and the base Drupal theme layer is Garland that was stripped down, re-built, and named “Elan”.

Like most community sites, the ALP has user profiles, discussion forums and an events calendar to help like-minded individuals connect. The homepage has a “What’s New” mini feed that updates as new content is added throughout the site. There is also the ability to create groups, open or private, for users with the same focus topic to discuss and collaborate on items like case studies and create a specific group blog. A specialized user dashboard was created so users could have all their options available to them from one location.

The portal’s other focus is research and information. It features a library that stores case studies, reports and news items. Users are also able to access and create Wiki documents. This content is overseen by site administrators and is searchable by type, topic or author tags. The homepage also features a feed from the Climate Prep.Org blog with the latest news items and reports.

Infrastructure

For the development, we used our standard environment which consist of dedicated mid-range servers (4GB of RAM, 2x CPUs @ 2 to 3 GHz). Database and web server are on the same machine.

For the deployment, we worked with the client's IT department to optimize their servers. ALP is on a dedicated machine, not a VPS, and the specifications are very similar to our test environment.

We saw four ways to make Drupal run faster: a bigger server, optimized server, optimized Drupal, and accelerators such as mem_cache, Varnish and CDN. For ALP, we focused on optimizing of the servers, on reducing the number of modules, on replacing contributed modules with simpler custom ones where it made sense, and on optimizing our custom modules.

Module Use

There were 42 modules used for the site, including 4 custom modules:

Contributed Modules

There were a number of contributed modules used for the project. Most notable are:

Views 6.x-2.10 - The Views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists and tables of content (nodes in Views 1, almost anything in Views 2) are presented

Organic groups 6.x-2.0 - Enables users to create and manage their own 'groups'. Each group can have subscribers, and maintains a group home page where subscribers communicate amongst themselves

Content Profile 6.x-1.0-beta4 - This module builds user profiles as content (aka nodes), which opens the opportunity to use all the powerful modules for content for user profiles too, e.g. the Content Construction Kit (CCK). It's intended to be simple and useful, but is extendable by other modules

Comments

The site is clean and attractive.
Custom-search results showing different tabs for different content types are very nice. Is it "WWF Search" custom module with "Search Results Tabbing feature"? "Homepage Slideshow" also cool,
Thanks for sharing your experience to the community.

Thanks for sharing and I did not ask any of the original questions, but I am working on a site where I need to put the same dots showing on your homepage. Would please share how I could accomplish the same, keeping in mind I am using the Views Slideshow module

Please learn some real science people. I'm all for preserving wildlife but stop allowing yourself to be duped by bogus emotional arguments that supposedly cause the danger. I used to buy into it myself, but not any more.

According to the description here, the Homepage Slideshow displays user defined content to allow for promotion of a certain content. I would like to use Views to implement a similar slideshow with content created by me only instead of my users. Could you advise me how to implement it and what modules you have used?

This page is written years ago and that time this website used Drupal as CMS for managing it. But now it seems that this website changed the application and website totally and it no longer uses Drupal. Currently it has only one page that links to other websites and it doesn't need Drupal for managing it. Drupal usually uses for managing professional and powerful websites.